Yezda Urfa - Sacred Baboon

Unheralded in their day and basically only known now for their belated second album Sacred Baboon, Yezda Urfa were one of the finest American progressive rock groups of the 70s. Their extremely rare debut album Boris has long been an in-demand collectors item and for good reason. It shows the band in a slightly rawer early stage performing five tracks that would later be rearranged for Sacred Baboon. Sacred Baboon, of course, is a very fine album in its own right, but I prefer Boris for its more immediate intensity. Yezda Urfa's brand of dazzlingly complex, Yes-influenced symphonic rock is an exercise in mad genius and rare dexterity. Often played at frantic speeds, the quintet rips through long (except the banjo stomp "Texas Armadillo") compositions of key and time changes like they spent every minute of those years practicing them. Suffice it to say that there isn't a second of this that doesn't awe you with their prowess, as they tear mercilessly through 32nd note speed riffs, contrapuntal craziness and jagged start/stops. It all leaves one completely breathless in the end and ready for more. Although the album is a $1500 collectors item, CD-Rs are starting to become widely available which means that a legitimate reissue of this is sorely needed. One of progressive rock's last unreissued masterpieces. Gnosis 2000

This was our second album, again put together by ourselves. Since no interest had been generated by our demo album, we decided to go for a second album that would be released on our own label with the hope that after it generated enough interest, it would attract the attention of a record company,
We funded the project ourselves, and just before finishing, we almost had a deal with a small label in Chicago, but the deal fell through. After completing the recording, but short of cash, we abandoned the idea of releasing the album and shelved the master tape.
Some eight years later, we were discovered by Syn-Phonic and the album was released in 1989 (thank you Peter Stoller!).
This album was recorded in about two weeks, in two different studios. We had started using the same studio as for the Boris album, but switched to another, more modern studio shortly after we started recording. In the time that had elapsed since recording Boris, our music had progressed and improved. Some of the material that appeared on Boris was reworked for this album. By Yezda Urfa

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